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| What is the bloke on this? He looks like a Gigalo crossed with touchy feely salsa teacher. |
I've just read a preview of the final week of the Premier League that was wetting itself about all the games happening in a time scale of less than 2 hours. A compressed spectacle of multichannel excitement where there are so many things going on at once that football will possibly explode and scatter the viewers to the winds on an orgasmic shockwave of dynamite behind closed doors action.
Imagine that. Literally 10 games happening AT THE SAME TIME.
A treat so exciting that it can only be served up once a season for fear that we'll gorge ourselves on the calorie rich football pie and die of football related obesity or a football heart attack, or football diabetes or contract football gout or need a gastric football band.
It's one big football day to end all big football days and it was invented by by Sky, the FA and some random evil guy from Monsanto in a red hot board meeting where the executives tossed around a bean bag and came up with ideas for 'how to make football better.'
When they'd rejected mad ideas like
- make it competitive
- don't play games on Friday night where fans have to do mad 500 mile round trips
- fuck VAR off cos it's shite
- do something about the mental wages that are driving club after club to the brink...
... they settled on the concept of 'playing the fixtures at the same time on the last day cos it's exciting'
Then they awarded themselves a solidarity payment or two and had celebratory dinner where they dined on the corpse of sporting integrity roasted in the fat of a bloated game, washed down by a nice glass of tears of the supporters of a defunct lower league club.
"Idiots" they chortled as they rested their glasses on their ten stomachs. "We've literally sold the same shit they always had back to them and told them it's a special occasion!"
That's how it always was. Football on Saturday, 3pm. And what a treat it really was. All the drama of the game, compressed into a neat package, starting at 2pm with the Sport on Two music and a breathless trek around the grounds to get the team news from Byron Butler, Peter Jones, Mike Ingham and let's not mention Stuart Hall. Fuck, I did. Anyway, he was more of a national treasure at that point than the national winner of the annual 'Is that cunt still alive? I assumed he was dead by now...' trophy. Is Rolf dead yet btw?
By 4:55pm the last scores had dribbled in then the music from Sports Report would play and it was reports, interviews and then all over by 6pm. Everything in all the divisions, wrapped up and the league tables all ready to be pored over in Football Pinks, Green Un's and Sunday papers, pristine and untouched, fixed in stone till the Tuesday night games rolled around, or sometimes for a whole seven days until the next action threw the pieces in the air again.
All the fun of the fair and all at once. 46 games in 90 minutes with 15 minutes to catch your breath. Not forgetting Roddy Forsythe rounding up Scotland adding a zesty icing to the moist rich cake of England. Every single week*
... they settled on the concept of 'playing the fixtures at the same time on the last day cos it's exciting'
Then they awarded themselves a solidarity payment or two and had celebratory dinner where they dined on the corpse of sporting integrity roasted in the fat of a bloated game, washed down by a nice glass of tears of the supporters of a defunct lower league club.
"Idiots" they chortled as they rested their glasses on their ten stomachs. "We've literally sold the same shit they always had back to them and told them it's a special occasion!"
That's how it always was. Football on Saturday, 3pm. And what a treat it really was. All the drama of the game, compressed into a neat package, starting at 2pm with the Sport on Two music and a breathless trek around the grounds to get the team news from Byron Butler, Peter Jones, Mike Ingham and let's not mention Stuart Hall. Fuck, I did. Anyway, he was more of a national treasure at that point than the national winner of the annual 'Is that cunt still alive? I assumed he was dead by now...' trophy. Is Rolf dead yet btw?
By 4:55pm the last scores had dribbled in then the music from Sports Report would play and it was reports, interviews and then all over by 6pm. Everything in all the divisions, wrapped up and the league tables all ready to be pored over in Football Pinks, Green Un's and Sunday papers, pristine and untouched, fixed in stone till the Tuesday night games rolled around, or sometimes for a whole seven days until the next action threw the pieces in the air again.
All the fun of the fair and all at once. 46 games in 90 minutes with 15 minutes to catch your breath. Not forgetting Roddy Forsythe rounding up Scotland adding a zesty icing to the moist rich cake of England. Every single week*
No, you couldn't sit at home every night getting fatter and angrier and redder in front of the telly, watching never-ending football but does anyone really *like* football that much to give a shit about 8 or 9 games a week?
Football just becomes a background noise, an unrelenting churn of never ending 'drama' and anyone who has ever watched telly can tell you that a programme broadcast weekly can maintain high standards, but a daily one becomes a soap opera or The One Show, forever searching for new ways to maintain your attention and avert you from the inevitable tedium. Forever trying to mask its tired sense of duty with shiny insincerity or absurd plot points.
After Sunday's games, the actual football will get back in its box again but the noise will go on. The airwaves will be full of pseudo matey chat about who is going where and what he thinks of him and what might happen if he does that and he doesn't like it and people throwing their heads back in laughter like they're having the absolute time of their lives talking complete shit about nothing and exchanging piss weak banter.
It's dismal as fuck telly and radio filling the abyss with meaningless inanity. Might as well just talk about what the weather might be in 3 weeks time to a cat as talk about whether Newcastle might or might not sign a Spanish full back or a Uruguayan one and whether or not those players might or might not be any good. Do something with your life instead. Read a random wikipedia page or something. Take up playing the spoons. Inject bleach, whatever.
Football should just fuck off completely for 6 or 7 weeks and let cricket and whatever else goes on in the summer have its time in the sun. It should fuck off in the season outside Saturday and some Tuesdays and know its place. It's just a game. A brilliant one, but a game none-the-less.
Sky calling playing all the games at once a 'special' occasion and telling you it's a 'football feast - brought to you in conjunction with Rennie Deflatine - deflating your stomach like letting the air out of a matchball' is akin to someone smashing up your house but then telling you've they've 'sorted the cutlery drawer out' as a kind favour. It's essentially taking the piss.
It's like smack - A small controlled dose of heroin on a regular basis is a habit that can be maintained across a long life, William S Burroughs made it to 83 based on this principle of regulating his pleasure**. It's when it spirals beyond that that people start walking around with their arses hanging out and stinking of piss and criminal intent, clutching their worldly possessions in a filthy carrier bag.
TV companies are football pushers, telling us to gorge more, more, more. Telling us we *need* more. That we can't wait. That's there's nothing but the drug, no other poetry or life to be had but football.
Fuck that, I want to detox. I just want my weekly fix. I don't want to have to jack up on Friday night, all day Saturday, a big chunk of Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday just to know what happened in one fucking division. I'll get off my head on Saturday and then live a clean life till it comes around again if it's all the same with you.
Give me some semtex and a map of the TV transmitters. We could have this 'special day' every week.
*barring snow and Tranmere playing home games on Friday night like mentalists.
** shooting his wife was admittedly a low point.
After Sunday's games, the actual football will get back in its box again but the noise will go on. The airwaves will be full of pseudo matey chat about who is going where and what he thinks of him and what might happen if he does that and he doesn't like it and people throwing their heads back in laughter like they're having the absolute time of their lives talking complete shit about nothing and exchanging piss weak banter.
It's dismal as fuck telly and radio filling the abyss with meaningless inanity. Might as well just talk about what the weather might be in 3 weeks time to a cat as talk about whether Newcastle might or might not sign a Spanish full back or a Uruguayan one and whether or not those players might or might not be any good. Do something with your life instead. Read a random wikipedia page or something. Take up playing the spoons. Inject bleach, whatever.
Football should just fuck off completely for 6 or 7 weeks and let cricket and whatever else goes on in the summer have its time in the sun. It should fuck off in the season outside Saturday and some Tuesdays and know its place. It's just a game. A brilliant one, but a game none-the-less.
Sky calling playing all the games at once a 'special' occasion and telling you it's a 'football feast - brought to you in conjunction with Rennie Deflatine - deflating your stomach like letting the air out of a matchball' is akin to someone smashing up your house but then telling you've they've 'sorted the cutlery drawer out' as a kind favour. It's essentially taking the piss.
It's like smack - A small controlled dose of heroin on a regular basis is a habit that can be maintained across a long life, William S Burroughs made it to 83 based on this principle of regulating his pleasure**. It's when it spirals beyond that that people start walking around with their arses hanging out and stinking of piss and criminal intent, clutching their worldly possessions in a filthy carrier bag.
TV companies are football pushers, telling us to gorge more, more, more. Telling us we *need* more. That we can't wait. That's there's nothing but the drug, no other poetry or life to be had but football.
Fuck that, I want to detox. I just want my weekly fix. I don't want to have to jack up on Friday night, all day Saturday, a big chunk of Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday just to know what happened in one fucking division. I'll get off my head on Saturday and then live a clean life till it comes around again if it's all the same with you.
Give me some semtex and a map of the TV transmitters. We could have this 'special day' every week.
*barring snow and Tranmere playing home games on Friday night like mentalists.
** shooting his wife was admittedly a low point.
*** While I'm on a roll, when did 'Golden Glove' become a thing and what absolute fucking gideon thinks that there's genuine tension involved in 'who will get most clean sheets?' No amount of OPTA stats and charts can disguise the fact it's a shit season with nothing to play for for pretty much everyone and has been that way since about February and it's the same year on year on year (except for that year it was quite good when Leicester won)
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